HIST 249 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: World View, Sectarianism, Mary Baker Eddy
Alternative Medicine
• Reading:
o Course pack: Norman Gevitz, “Unorthodox Medical Systems”
•
Assignment #2:
o Secondary literature that mentions information that is from the textbook - that is
okay
o Question 1 & 2 - how to interpret the text
• What is the author doing in this text? What is the text doing?
• Don’t just stick with finding a definition
• Go beyond this
• Don’t just define tuberculous
• What is the text doing
• This is the same for question #2
• Author does not say "my strategy is…."
• More about finding out about what the text does
• If it turns out that a lot of the students interpreted the question in a specific
way grades will be adjusted
• 19th & 20th century - Alternative Medicine
o Readings - Gevitz - unorthodox healing system, survey & discussion of hypothesis
o Helps you understand mainstream modern medicine too
• Alternatives to 'Alternative'
o
Natural
• Assume there is something unnatural about mainstream medicine
• What is natural?
• Black box -- what is so unnatural?
• Something is 'unnatural' about biomedicine… but what
o
Complementary
• Add on to biomedicine
• Value neutral
• Did not think of themselves as complementary to mainstream medicine
• Invented quite recently by biomedicine to make peace
• Real people in charge - still mainstream doctors
• Permitted as an add on only to mainstream medicine
o
Unorthodox
• Realistic
• Value judgement on the nature of alterative medicine
• All alternative medicine made in opposition to mainstream medicine (but this
wasn’t always the case)
• Accurate
• Heretical
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2
• Deviant
• A historical perspective - reading (Don Bayes)
o 19th-21st centuries - western modern medicine embraces new concepts (disease
specificity, localization, physiology)
o Principles that underline modern medicine are very similar to traditional western
medicine
o Western traditional medicine - persist in the population & become 'alternative
medicine'
o Hippocratic medicine - balance, imbalance, humoural theory
o Western modern medicine - disease specificity, pathological anatomy, not about
balance/environment, is about pin pointing a cause, capturing the disease as an
entity
o Galenism - folk
o
The alternative medicine paradigm
A. Body
â–Ş Holistic - body/soul, environment, lifestyle
• The body & soul are the same
• A whole
â–Ş Fluids & energy
B.
Disease
â–Ş Imbalance in the body
â–Ş Putrefaction (toxins)
• Old fashioned idea
• Many medicines are about purifying the body of toxins
• New concern about the environment
C. Therapy
â–Ş Re-balancing, cleansing, helping nature heal
â–Ş Emphasis on hygiene & prevention
â–Ş Preference for herbal pharmacopeia
â–Ş Continuum between profession & self help
• Shared knowledge between the practitioner & physician
• Western traditional medicine
• Bedside medicine
â–Ş Recuma - root & herb medicine
â–Ş 19th century - first nations were thought to have more knowledge on
herbs & natural medicine
â–Ş 'Spa culture'
â–Ş European's have lead the way
â–Ş
Hydrotherapy
• Use of water goes back to antiquity
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3
• Vinzenz Priessnitz - farmer
• Sebastian Kneipp - priest
• 101 ways of applying water to your body, hot baths, cold
baths, baths with different kinds of water (salt)
• Reconnecting with nature
• Walking bare foot in grass
• Nature - becoming de-naturalized
• For city dwellers - physical reconnection with the earth
â–Ş
John Harvey Kellogg - 1938
• Kellogg's cereal
• Used to be a health food
• For suppressing sexual urges
• Health reformer of the period
• Focus on the digestive system
• Biomedicine
• Esoteric
â–Ş Doctor has a type of training/education that is foreign to anyone who is
not trained/educated as a doctor
â–Ş Hospital medicine
â–Ş Scientific knowledge - ordinary people do not even have the vocab for
â–Ş Pathology - often thought of as putrefaction - uses everyday experience
to understand health & disease
â–Ş Words used are words that patients would understand
• Doctors knowledge = Knowledge of disease
â–Ş Signs & symptoms to label disease precisely
• Not about knowledge of disease, is about knowledge of the patient
â–Ş Disease is more of a thing / object
â–Ş Discovery of micro's in the 18th century - specific living agents being
responsible for disease
â–Ş They are the cause of the disease
â–Ş Cholera is cholera no matter who has it
â–Ş It is always the same disease
â–Ş Patients simply become patients of the disease
â–Ş (Different than Hippocrates medicine - not about the individual patient
dealing with a disease)
• Criterion for admissible therapy = if the doctor knows why it works
• Efficacy determined by the doctor (MD)
• Western traditional medicine
• Exoteric
• Knowledge of patient
• Disease = event or relationship, of the individual
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